PureOutside Outdoor Wiki!
Karl Woll | June 7, 2010 10:12 amI have some really exciting news to share with outdoor enthusiasts around Vancouver today. There is an invaluable new tool to add to our arsenal of trip planning and information sharing. Ross Collicutt (www.PureOutside.com) has created a wiki for Vancouver and Vancouver Island outdoor nuts!
Below is a guest post from Ross on the new wiki:
Any time I need information about the outdoors on Vancouver Island or in Vancouver or anywhere in the world, I hop on to the internet. It’s speed for finding information about nearly anything is unmatched. There’s a problem though.
All this wonderful information is scattered across the internet. Some on large websites, some on small ones, some hidden in cryptic trip reports that rarely see public eye. PureOutside aims to change that.
How?
Well the first step was the blog. It helps. It’s good at listing the latest news and events and putting a bit of information about something online. But it’s for things that are in chronological order. We needed something better.
Enter the Outdoor Wiki.
You may not have heard of wiki’s before. Wikipedia is a wiki. It’s basically a website that anyone can add to or edit. Anyone can add things, edit things or delete things from Wikipedia. Same thing with the Outdoor Wiki. Anyone can use it. Anyone can add their information, their trip reports, their reviews. No special software involved. It’s all in the wiki.
But I don’t know how to program
The beauty of the wiki is that you don’t need to know how to program. All you need to know how to do is type. You can do that right? You’re half way there.
The first step is to head to the How-To page. This will give you some instructions on how to sign up and start adding content.
After you’re logged in, you can edit any page you want. Bear in mind that anything you put on there can be edited by anyone else. Be respectful to what you change and delete on the wiki or you might find your content gets edited as well. There won’t be much need to delete anything off the site though since we want to collect as much solid info about trails, lakes, mountains, outdoor activities and gear as we can pack in there.
The editing process is straightforward. Click edit at the top of the page where you want to add something. You will be taken to the edit page where you can type any text you like into the textbox. After you’ve made you changes, click save. You’re done!
Well, almost. One of the beauties of the wiki is how easy it is to link information together. When you want to create a new page or link to an existing page, simply put the page name in double square brackets. If you want to make a page called “Awesome Mountains to Climb in Vancouver” just write this on your page [[Awesome Mountains to Climb in Vancouver]]. Save that page and Voila! you have a link to your new page. Click on that link and get started writing good stuff about your Awesome Mountains.
Make it spiffy
There are a few other things you can do make your pages even better. We’ve got a test page set up so you can see examples of some things you can in the wiki.
Putting an asterisk (*) in front of a line makes one point in a bulleted list. Putting a pound sign (#) at the beginning of a line makes a numbered list. So this:
# Whistler
# Blackcomb
# Grouse
Will turn into after you save it:
1. Whistler
2. Blackcomb
3. Grouse
Cool eh?
You can use headings too. They’re just as easy to set up. Use the equals sign to make your headings (=). Put one equals sign on each side of your heading. Use one equals sign for the biggest, baddest heading. Use 2 for something not so big and bad. They go up to 5. So just write this to get a couple of headings
= My Heading Level 1 =
=== My Heading Level 3 ===
One point to remember with the headings is they get put into a table of contents at the top. If you’ve got a long page, you’ll want to separate them with headings so it will be easier to get around.
On your way
One last thing before you start adding all your favorite outdoor information to the wiki. Try to keep it organized. Search for a page before you add it. If it’s already there, just add to it. It will only get confusing if we all start adding duplicates of pages.
If you have any questions, comment on this post or email us at pureoutside@gmail.com. Hope to see your info on the wiki soon!
Ross
Most at home riding and running on the trails and mountains, Ross heads inside once and a while to stretch his mad coding skillz making websites like this one.
Ross has already plugged in a lot of info for the Island and I’m slowly cracking away at Vancouver. So far I have a lot of Outdoor Clubs and Outdoor Shops, and will slowly be working on the other sections.
The more people who use this tool, the better it becomes, so please share this new tool and contribute anything you can!
Also, I’d like to extend a big thanks to Ross who’s hard work has made this possible for everyone. This kind of information sharing and pooling of resources was one of the reasons I started this blog, so to see the new Pure Outside wiki is really inspiring!
I’ll have a permanent link dedicated to the wiki on the top of this blog so you can always find it from here (but make sure you bookmark it!)
Tags: PureOutside,Wiki
Categories: News, Website Updates
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